Đề tài: Improving listening skill for the 2nd year students at Faculty of English and modern languages, HOU Improving listening skill for the 2nd year students at Faculty of English and modern languages, HOU Acknowledgement I am, first of all, greatly indebted to my supervisor, Nguyen Trung Kien, for his valuable suggestions, instructions and correction without which I can hardly fulfill this study. I would like to thank all my friends and teachers at HOU who have supported and guided my thinking by permanent observation, critical comments and those who have helped me by their approval. My deep appreciation also goes to the second-year students at HOU who help me to collect data for this study. Finally, my appreciation and gratitude are also extended to my family, for their assistance, support and encouragement during development of this study. All have enabled me to fulfill my study. Introduction 1.1 Rational Compared with other language skills’, listening is considered as the most difficulty skill for many students learning English. The importance of listening comprehension has been stressed in English as a foreign language in Vietnamfor the last decade. Theoretically, listening comprehension is viewed as an active and conscious process in which listeners construct meaning by using cues from contextual information and from existing knowledge. Students generate information in their long term memory and make their own interpretation of the oral texts (Murphy, 1985, Mendelssohn, 1994). Since students have limited memory capacity for the target language, they use different strategies for listening comprehension. Today, English listening plays an important role in out daily conversation because the demand to communicate with foreigners is increasing rapidly. However, little formal emphasis has been placed on developing listening skills helping students to learn listening. In reality, many students at HOU failed in the listening skill task specially the second-year students, although they were successful in the test of other skills. Therefore, the present study is done to improve listening skill for the second-year students at HOU. I hope that my study will be effective for students learnt listening skill. 1.2 Aims of study The purpose of this study is to improve the listening skill for the second-year student at Faculty of English and Modern Language, HOU. Moreover, the aims are to help listeners realize the relationship between listening skill and other skills, to see some common problems and to solve these problems by some suggestion. 1.3 Scope of study How to improve listening skill is not an easy question. I only focus on my basis knowledge of listening and point out some suggestion for the problems. That is the reason why I chose the second year student at Faculty of English and Modern Language, HOU as the subject for the graduation paper. 1.4 Method of study 1.4.1 Collecting data I have already collected data in library and internet to help me complete this subject. I also asked some students to find out useful data. Because the time is not enough I found in books for interesting information. Moreover, I also based on useful documentary which my supervisor gave. 1.4.2 Survey question I have interview students to get information about their experiment when they listening. These data and information collected are analyzed in detail to support my subject. 1.5 Design of the study The study is organized into four chapters. It begins with the introduction which deals with the rationale and the structure of the study. Chapter I give a review of literature, concentrating on listening skill in the process of language learning and factors that affect the process of listening Chapter II – Finding and discussion, focuses on the methods used to gather and analyzed data, describes the current situation of students at HOU and some potential problems that students often meet. Chapter III develop listening skill with some activities for the further improvement of listening skill at HOU Chapter IV discusses suggestions from the study to be successful listener. The last part is the conclusion which gives a brief summary of the study, is serves as a revision of the study and then closes it. CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW Listening is a very important skill that demands deep research to help learners to master. Students have enough listening materials and furthermore they listen to standard voice tones. Moreover, students have to distinguish spoken language from other sounds. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the readers some general knowledge on listening. The chapter begins with the listening definition and the role of listening. Secondly, there is a brief review of the relationship with listening and other skills. Finally, the chapter presents some factors which affect to listening skill. 1.1 Listening skill in the process of language learning 1.1.1Definition of listening Communication has played a vital role in our day life. Of course, one of communication part is listening. Listening has become an essential element of communication so listening include from learning particular sounds to comprehending complicated messages. In order to construct the message that the speaker intends, the addressee must actively contribute knowledge from both linguistic and non-linguistic sources. Listening is one of the most important skills we can have. How well we listen has a major impact on our job effectiveness, and on the quality of our relationships with other. Moreover, listening is a vital part in communication. We can not communicate without listening. That is a reason a successful communication depends on listeners as receives of messages. Listening is interpretive process through which listeners generate internal text which commonly differ from what they hear in unexpected ways (Murphym1985) so that the listener has to put all his energy to communicate with the text. Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structure interpret stress and intention, train and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of utterance (Wipf, 1984). (Rostm2002) defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says ( receptive orientation), constructing and representing meaning (construct orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding and representing (collaborative orientation) and creating meaning (collaborative orientation) and creating meaning through involvement , imagination and empathy (transformative orientation). Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear and with what they know.